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What Makes Your Clients Tick? A Peek at 10 Finance Firms’ Customers

NewMediaMetrics Emotional Attachment Index shows banks get less love than other brands.

Cars. Dog food. Banks. They’re all the same to NewMediaMetrics, a New York-based marketing research firm that studies the interplay between consumers’ favorite activities, the media they use and their attachment to brands in a variety of industries.

Using online surveys of 4,250 people nationwide of both sexes, ages 13 to 64, the NewMediaMetrics Emotional Attachment Index examines consumer information about 380 different brands, including 10 banks and financial services companies. The index breaks down the specifics of who prefers what brand, and then matches that data to people’s personal interests and favorite media—valuable data for any advisor looking to advertise to those consumers, or for advisors at these institutions who want to better connect with their clients.

For example, Bank of America customers’ top three media picks are Google Search, Amazon.com and YouTube, while their personal interests are primarily focused on news, health and cooking. Compare that with Charles Schwab customers, who number the National Football League playoffs and the NFL regular season among their favorite media, and whose personal interests include finance and investment, computers and software, and politics.

Considered against consumers’ love of cars or fast-food restaurants, financial institutions have a long way to go before they can rival the strong emotional human bond between a mother and child, which is the relationship that the attachment index uses as its benchmark, says NewMediaMetrics co-founder Denise Larson, who notes that customer loyalty is much stronger when a company sells to people with strongly positive feelings about their brands.

And here’s another unusual bit of data gleaned from the surveys: of the 10 financial companies surveyed, consumers feel a greater attachment to their investment companies than they do to their banks.

“The bottom six are banks as opposed to the investment companies, which are the top four,” Larson says. “What that says to me is that while there is an attachment to banks, they are not the most highly emotionally attaching products. The four most attaching are the investment companies, and that tells me that people care about what their investments are up to.”

Read on to learn about the emotional pull of 10 financial companies, in reverse order of consumer preference, along with marketing info about customers’ personal interests and favorite media.